Cicso product users should check out this latest issue Secunia has released today - a problem with the htmlentities and htmlspecialchars functions that can lead to buffer overflows.

The vulnerabilities are caused due to boundary errors within the "htmlentities()" and "htmlspecialchars()" functions. If a PHP application uses these functions to process user-supplied input, this can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow by passing specially crafted data to the affected application.

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code, but requires that the UTF-8 character set is selected.

There are some patches that have been released to correct this issue (like the one for the Cisco Unified Application Environment) but others are still yet to come. They recommend limiting access to only trusted IPs and devices only to reduce the risk of the problem being exploited.

Cicso product users should check out this latest issue Secunia has released today - a problem with the htmlentities and htmlspecialchars functions that can lead to buffer overflows.

The vulnerabilities are caused due to boundary errors within the "htmlentities()" and "htmlspecialchars()" functions. If a PHP application uses these functions to process user-supplied input, this can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow by passing specially crafted data to the affected application.

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code, but requires that the UTF-8 character set is selected.

There are some patches that have been released to correct this issue (like the one for the Cisco Unified Application Environment) but others are still yet to come. They recommend limiting access to only trusted IPs and devices only to reduce the risk of the problem being exploited.